Fields in which crops are planted rarely have a homogeneous soil composition. Different soil types have a different ability to retain water and nutrients. Also weeds and pests will distribute themselves in a non-uniform fashion across a field. Consequently, if uniform application of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and water is carried out, there will be varied crop yield, pest control, weed control, fungus control, for example. This problem induced the development of customized soil and crop treatment, which has been a very high priority research area in the agricultural industry over the last decade.
Early attempts at customizing soil and crop treatment involved manual mapping of the field, monitoring of soil type and condition, and yield monitoring. Of late, field mapping has become substantially more sophisticated. Global positioning system (GPS) receiver circuitry is now used to accurately geo-reference data from a sensor for use in creating a field map.
As technology in the agricultural area has provided numerous additional sensor types, existing field mapping systems have been unable to accommodate the newly available data. Available agricultural sensors now include electromagnetic conductivity sensors, yield monitoring sensors, laser altitude sensors, depth sensors, moisture sensors, flow rate sensors and plant stand count sensors, for example. Currently in the industry, each time a new type of agricultural sensor is developed, a new piece of interface hardware must be designed to handle the information coming from the sensor. Further, existing systems provide relatively little flexibility in mapping data from multiple types of agricultural sensors.